2019 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

How students approach learning could be indicative of their cognitive engagement with the learning tasks they encounter in their engineering programs. Their cognitive engagement with learning tasks could have implication for actual performance and whether they continue to feel motivated to deeply engage with learning, or become disengaged, disinterested and eventually consider dropping out of their engineering program. However, students’ approach to learning engineering material could be deeply ingrained in their achievement goal orientation – meaning that efforts at helping students to become better learners might benefit from helping them set and realize achievement goals that orientate them towards adopting productive learning habits. In this study, we examined the relationships between the achievement goals that students adopt, their approach to learning and performance in an engineering classroom. Participants included 87 students enrolled in an introductory Fluid Mechanics course. Students participated in classroom activities and exam scores as well as took measures of achievement goal and learning approach. We conducted correlational analysis of three goal types: task-related, self-related and other-related, and two learning approaches: deep learning and surface learning strategies and student’s final performance in the class. Lastly, we conducted multiple regression analysis to determine the relative contribution of each variable to predicting students’ academic performance. Implications of these findings for student engagement in engineering classrooms will be discussed.